I’m wasting a lot of time repeatedly trying to expand snippets in Word Comment boxes – all sorts, not confined to one class – after having done a CTRL+/ search. It frequently times out, after I hear the ding, and now it has started expanding when I click back into the main text.
Is this a known issue or is it likely to be something in my set-up that’s causing it? This issue does come and go but there doesn’t seem to be any common factor other than the Comment boxes and the search.
I’m a copyeditor and this use is the main reason for my subscription, and I’m currently wasting more time than I’m saving.
Can somebody please help me?
That would drive me nuts! I’m assuming you’re on Windows. Here’s something you can try:
Do you have Word set up to save your clipboards? One way to troubleshoot this is to click into the System Tray on your computer. Do you see the Word clipboard icon shown in this screenshot:
If so, please right-click that icon and choose ‘Stop Collecting’. Now, try your expansions again. Do you still see the clipboard expanded? I know this certainly isn’t ideal but if that does fix the issue, that will help our engineers locate the problem. Please let me know if it solves the problem!
If that doesn’t work, can you tell me:
- What version of TextExpander you’re using?
- What version of Word?
- Windows or Mac?
- Does this happen with all Snippets or select ones?
Thank you for responding.
No, I don’t have that icon in the system tray.
My TextExpander version is 8.2.6 (826.1)
Windows 11 Pro 24H2
Word 365
It happens with all snippets, but not all the time – though it is getting more and more frequent. Only happens after a CTRL+/ search and only in the Comment boxes.
Hi Sharon, I checked with support, and it seems to be a known issue.
Hi Josh
Are they working on it, and is there anything I can do to militate against it?
Sharon Gray
Hey @SharonGray, to clarify, are you using the Word desktop app or Word 365 in the browser?
Desktop app. (This is an aside to fill up my requirement to use 20 characters. 
)
I agree that the 20-character minimum was annoying, so I dropped it down to 10. That was a Discourse default.
Sharon, we suspect the issue may be performance-related, since you’re seeing a delay between invoking Inline Search and the expansion. Is this happening in especially large files? Are you seeing performance issues or slowdowns elsewhere?
Yes, quite often. As I said, I’m a copyeditor, and I’m working on documents that are almost always over 200 pages and, with Track Changes, are remembering thousands of edits by the time I get to the end. Saying that, I work exclusively on fiction, so they are simple documents – all text, with no tables, lists, diagrams or illustrations.
But does that explain why, when it’s been sitting doing nothing while I have the Comment box open, it expands immediately I click back into the main text? And why it only happens after the search?
Thanks
Sharon
Hi Sharon, engineering is investigating.
Hi Sharon, as a sanity check could you go verify the version. You can do this by going to File > Account (down at the bottom of the menu). In there you’ll see one of the tiles is “About Word” with a Version and build number next to it. The reason I ask you this is that this morning I reproduced the issue you saw, I then closed and restarted word to get a video recording software going and I went to reproduce the issue again and it was working just fine.
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Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2505 Build 16.0.18827.20102) 64-bit
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